Blood of the Isles

by Bryan Sykes

  In the year 789 it is recorded that the King of Wessex married the daughter of the Mercian King Offa. Almost as an afterthought is added this ominous sequel:

  And in his days came first three ships from Horthaland and then the reeve [the King’s sheriff ] rode thither and tried to compel them to go to the royal manor, for he did not know what they were; and then they slew him. These were the first ships of the Danes to come to England.

  This was a chilling prelude to yet more raids, invasions and warfare by the mixed hordes of Vikings and Danes. After two centuries without any substantial foreign invasions in England, it looked as if it was starting all over again. After the killing of the king’s sheriff in 789, on what has all the appearance of a reconnaissance mission, the Vikings paid most attention to the north of Britain and to Ireland, as we have already seen. But this was only a temporary respite. In 835 there was a large raid in Kent, then annually after that until, in 865, there was a full-scale invasion. The Danish Great Army landed in East Anglia led by Ivar Ragnusson, better known as Ivar the Boneless. I have rather a soft spot for Ivar the Boneless, because he was said to have suffered from the same genetic disease which I once researched myself. He was born, so it is said, with ‘only gristle where his bones should have been’. From this description, Ivar almost certainly suffered from osteogenesis imperfecta, an inherited form of severe brittle-bone disease. If Ivar was anything like the osteogenesis patients I got to know he would have been very short, unable to walk without aid and with badly deformed limbs and spine. His head, however, would have been of normal size and his mental functions not impaired in the least.

  The mystique of a fully mature mind in the broken body of a child is very powerful. I am not surprised that, even with this great physical disability, which would have prevented him from any combat himself, he was able to command an army by his legendary wisdom and force of personality alone. He was carried into battle on a shield. It must have been a disconcerting sight for the enemy.

  Ivar forced the East Anglian king to supply him with food, horses and winter quarters, and next spring marched his troops north and captured the Northumbrian capital of York, beginning the long association between this city, renamed Jorvik by Ivar, and the Vikings. The Great Army then moved south to invade Mercia, then east to complete the invasion of East Anglia, which culminated in the brutal murder of Edmund, the Anglian king who had supplied the Great Army when it first landed. In three short years the Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia had been utterly destroyed.

  The rampaging Great Army then turned south and prepared to invade Wessex. For the first time, the Danes were defeated, on the Berkshire Downs near Reading by Alfred and his brother Aethelred. The Danes withdrew and attacked again, this time beating the Saxon force near Basingstoke. The Danes were reinvigorated by the arrival of a new army in 871 and then prepared for the final showdown with the Saxons, with Alfred at their head. Alfred’s Wessex and Mercia under King Burgred were the only Saxon kingdoms left in England that were not under Danish control. The Danes left Alfred alone for five years, and headed north, conquering Mercia en route to Yorkshire, which they began to divide up into permanent settlements. Then, at last, the Great Army turned south to attack the remnants of Saxon resistance in Wessex. They crushed Alfred at Chippenham in 878 and forced the king to retreat to his refuge in the marshes of Somerset, where he spent the winter arranging reinforcements. In the spring of 879 he headed towards Wiltshire and engaged the Danes at Edington Down on the slopes of Salisbury Plain near Warminster. He crushed the Great Army completely and forced their commander Guthrum to come to terms. The treaty separated England into two halves, with the dividing line running roughly north-west from London to the coast near Liverpool. East of the line was the Danelaw, to the west was Alfred’s Saxon England. Schoolchildren learn that Alfred the Great saved England from the Danes. He clearly did not, as the Danes won control of half the country. Unsurprisingly, the peace did not last. Another army landed in 893, but restricted its campaign to the Danelaw and left Alfred’s kingdom undisturbed.

  From the genetic point of view I could see it was going to be hard to distinguish between Saxon and Dane. They both came from roughly the same place, their cultures were very similar, built around the Great Hall ideals of Beowulf. It was beginning to look, from the genetic point of view, like just another layer of north Germans and Scandinavians.

  The next century saw the gradual reconquest of the Danelaw by the Saxon kings of Wessex. There were the inevitable setbacks. Norse armies recaptured York in 939 and 947, on the latter occasion under the command of the colourfully named Eric Bloodaxe. Another Danish army, under the equally chromatic Harold Bluetooth, had to be bought off after defeating an English militia in Essex. That only encouraged more raids, and by the turn of the first millennium huge amounts of cash had been paid to the Danes as what amounted to protection money.

  The Vikings also used the same methods on the other side of the Channel. In 911 Hrolfe of Norway, or Rollo as he is more commonly known, sailed up the Seine and blockaded the river. In exchange for lifting the siege and withdrawing the threat to attack Paris, Rollo demanded, and got, a grant of land on the north-west coast from the French king. He became the first Duke of Normandy. He, his followers and descendants soon immersed themselves in French language and culture, though never forgetting their Viking roots.

  Meanwhile, in England, the endless wars between Saxon and Dane continued. King Aethelred ordered a massacre of all Danes in England in 1002 – an impossible task, but serving to spread more hysteria and violence. Danes in Oxford took refuge in a church, but the citizens burned it down with the Danes still inside. The attempted ethnic cleansing forced Sweyn, the King of Denmark, to intervene, which he did on two unsuccessful campaigns until, in 1013, he launched a full-scale invasion. Aethelred fled to Normandy and thus began the fateful alliance that was to lead directly to the Norman Conquest. On Sweyn’s death the following year his son Cnut, or Canute, inherited the Danish throne. By 1016 he had crushed Saxon resistance and become King of England as well. Notoriously he is the monarch who sat on the beach commanding the tide to retreat as a show of strength, but it was actually done to demonstrate his limitations in the face of nature. He was, in fact, a surprisingly good king, even though he divided his time between England and Denmark. But the fortunes of Wessex, whose regal supremacy Cnut had terminated, revived as Godwine, the Earl of Wessex, rose to prominence, even though he was not of the royal house.

  Cnut died in 1035 and was succeeded by his son Harold. When Harold passed away five years later, his brother Harthacnut reigned for two brief years before he too died in 1042. That was the end of three decades of direct Danish rule and the kingdom was once more under a Saxon king, Edward (the Confessor), the son of Aethelred. Edward had grown up in Normandy at the court of his father-in-law, Richard, Duke of Normandy, after Aethelred had fled to France to escape the Danes in 1013. Already the Saxon royal family owed a debt to the Normans, a debt which only increased when the Earl of Wessex, Godwine, defied the king and threatened to seize control. To deflect this ambition of Godwine, according to Norman propaganda, Edward, who had no children, promised the succession to William, Duke of Normandy. When Godwine died, he was succeeded to the earldom of Wessex by his son Harold who, again according to the Norman version of events, promised to back William of Normandy’s claim to the English throne.

  However, as he lay dying, Edward named Harold as his successor and England’s last Saxon king came to occupy the throne on 5 January 1066. As William, Duke of Normandy, prepared the ground for invasion to press his claim to the Crown of England, the Danes were getting ready to do the same. Harald Hardraade, whose claim to the throne came through Cnut, was the first to attack. He invaded Northumbria and occupied York. King Harold, whose main army was in the south anticipating William’s invasion from Normandy, was forced to move north to deal with Hardraade. This they did, and destroyed the Viking army at the battle of Stamford Bridge, close to
York, on 25 September. Hardraade was killed. Three days later, on 28 September, William landed with his army at Pevensey Bay on the Sussex coast. Only nineteen days after defeating the Danes at York, Harold’s exhausted army arrived to confront William at Senlac Hill, near Hastings. On the morning of 14 October 1066 the battle forces lined up. Harold’s Saxon army massed behind a wall of shields on the crest of the hill and threw back charge after charge by William’s heavy cavalry. In mid-afternoon, sections of Harold’s army broke away to pursue a feigned Norman retreat and, without the advantage of the high ground, were cut off and overwhelmed. Harold was killed by an arrow and the day was lost. His men did not surrender, but fought to the death. They were all killed.

  Having survived nearly three centuries of almost continuous attack by Vikings from Norway and Denmark, the Saxon dynasty of Alfred eventually succumbed to the Vikings from France. The resistance had lasted from the day in the summer of 789 when the king’s sheriff was murdered on the Dorset coast, to the death of the last of Harold’s huscarls on an autumn afternoon 277 years later. In the 940 years since the Norman Conquest many have tried to invade the Isles, but none has succeeded.

  17

  THE DNA OF ENGLAND

  Our strategy for recruiting volunteers for the Genetic Atlas Project in England was at first the same as our successful campaigns in Scotland, through blood-donor sessions. We did try one or two other methods, like setting up stalls at agricultural fairs. This worked very well in Cornwall, where a team at the nearby University of Plymouth was conducting a medical research project which involved taking blood samples. In other places it was less successful, mainly because we had not developed our cheek swab method for collecting DNA and were asking for blood. A further factor was that the majority of visitors to agricultural shows were farmers. On the one hand, this was why we had originally thought of the shows as a good place to collect DNA samples, reasoning that we were more likely to encounter families whose roots in the surrounding countryside went back a very long way. That part of the logic turned out to be true. But the flaw was that most farmers are men. If there is one universal truth which many years of fieldwork has taught me, it is that men are far more reluctant to give a DNA sample in unfamiliar surroundings than are women. In the blood-donor clinics it was different. We were part of the main event, not separate as I felt we were at the shows. If we had been a little more patient and perfected our approach, and if we had tried again with our cheek swab method, it may have worked. I think the reasoning was right; in Cornwall, where this worked really well, practically everybody whose DNA was sampled had at least two grandparents from the local area.

  Our first English blood-donor sessions were in East Anglia and over a couple of months we collected almost 1,500 blood samples in ways with which you are now familiar. I well remember travelling over the flat lands of the fens, where the soil is almost black and raised dykes drain the excess water to the sea. Scattered farmhouses and the occasional windbreak of Scots pine are all that protrude above the deadpan flatness. I know many people love the feel of openness and the big skies of East Anglia, but I need hills. When asking donors about their own origins, I was surprised how little movement there had been in the fens, even at places only a few miles from cosmopolitan cities like Cambridge. On one visit to a blood-donor session at the market town of Chatteris, 15 featureless miles north of Cambridge, the insularity of the fens came home to me when I was sitting next to a man in his forties, a farmworker, and going through my introduction of why we were there and why we wanted some of his blood. I explained how we were building up a genetic map and that was why we needed to know where people came from, so we could locate them properly on the map. When I had finished, he said he thought he probably shouldn’t take part. That was unheard of, so I asked him why. He said it was because he had moved into Chatteris only recently.

  ‘That’s no problem,’ I replied cheerfully. ‘We can put you on the map wherever you’re from, so long as we know. Where did you come from, before you came to live in Chatteris?’

  ‘From Wimblington,’ he replied.

  ‘And where is Wimblington?’ I enquired, ready to be told it was in Yorkshire or Dorset or somewhere else a long way away.

  ‘It’s up the road towards March,’ he replied. And so it is, by 5 miles!

  I think of that episode from time to time. The man is almost certainly still living in Chatteris and whenever I am asked how on earth I could ever expect to compile a genetic map from today’s inhabitants that will reveal anything about the distant past, since people are so mobile these days, I tell them about the man from Chatteris.

  Things were going nicely. We had more or less completed our DNA collections from Scotland, Wales and East Anglia and we had just been awarded another two years’ funding from our major sponsors, the Wellcome Trust, which would give us ample time to complete our collections from the rest of England. I had arranged with other blood-transfusion regions in England to continue our work along the same lines. Word had got round that we did not interfere with the smooth running of the donor sessions. Indeed, donors on the whole enjoyed hearing about our work and it added a little more interest to their visit. I had a wonderful team who had honed their skills with, by now, three years of practice. In particular two of them, Emilce Vega and Eileen Hickey, who were assigned full time to the Genetic Atlas Project, were literally irresistible.

  Nobody, male or female, young or old, could refuse Eileen and Emilce. They were, and still are, both striking young ladies, but in utterly different ways. Both are tall and slim, but while Eileen has the bright blue eyes, pale skin and auburn hair of her Irish ancestors, Emilce has the dark hair and deep brown eyes of her Argentinian forebears. Travelling to donor sessions with Eileen and Emilce was always interesting and our arrival at the small hotels we regularly used was always eagerly anticipated, and not because the owners were glad to see me again. Yes, things were going very well. Then disaster struck.

  In scientific research the way is rarely smooth. Funds can be withdrawn, labs may have to be moved, extra duties of teaching or administration can be suddenly announced. It was none of these things. I put it all down to Ally McBeal. She, for those of you who do not know the TV series, was a glamorous Boston lawyer, though prone to fits of hysteria and some very strange dreams. Suddenly a career in law became a very attractive option for young women. Two of my team announced that they were abandoning their scientific careers to retrain as lawyers. And one of them was Emilce. It’s always sad to see that happen, but it is also very understandable. Despite all the publicity about how badly the country needs scientists, the prospects for young scientists are actually pretty dismal. Even if you succeed against very stiff competition in landing a junior academic position with the chance of a career in science, the pay is not good. With the upsurge in biotechnology in the late 1990s, law firms were keen to recruit and retrain geneticists for work in that sector as either patent or commercial lawyers. I could hardly object, and I did not. Soon afterwards, Eileen decided to move into forensics, which at least offered the prospect of long-term security, which young scientists crave. Of course, I cannot really blame Ally McBeal, but the loss of my two best fieldworkers was a blow. By the time I had recruited replacements for Eileen and Emilce, there were only ten months for the project to run. It was too late to get the new recruits up to speed on the delicate technique of charming the DNA out of blood donors.

  So I decided to fall back on Plan B. This had its origins in an unexpectedly fruitful visit a few years previously to a service station on the M6 motorway, where I had first seen an advertisement for the electoral roll in electronic form. As this ad was in the toilets I was a little doubtful, but I ordered a copy anyway. It has been extremely useful and I have used it extensively in my genealogy work, tracing the names and addresses of men who share the same surname. Plan B aimed to recruit volunteers for the Genetic Atlas Project in parts of England we now no longer had the time to visit through blood-donor sessions. We could have w
ritten to people in the regions of England we needed to cover and asked for their help directly. But there were two predictable drawbacks here. First, this would be unsolicited mail with very little context and likely, as with other unexpected material, to dive head first into the wastepaper bin. The second problem was that we would have been unable to tell by their addresses alone whether people were new arrivals to an area or whether they had lived there all their lives. Although we could have placed the origins of new arrivals elsewhere in the Isles, which would still have been useful, we really needed people with deep roots in the area, like Chatteris Man, to fill in the large gaps that we still had left in our coverage of England.

  We got round this by combing the electoral role for surnames. By choosing names which we could tell from their geographical distribution were local to the areas where we needed coverage, we stood a good chance of getting hold of volunteers who had, at least on their father’s side, been there for several generations. Thanks to the strictly enforced feudal system instigated all over England after the Norman Conquest, estates had insisted that men adopt surnames. This was so that they could be told apart and so that inheritance of land tenancies from father to son could be properly controlled. By the end of the thirteenth century the practice had spread throughout the land, and practically everyone in England had a forename and a surname.

  The logic of Plan B was that if we had a DNA sample from a man whose surname we knew was concentrated in an area we needed to cover, his Y-chromosome had probably been in the vicinity since the thirteenth century. For this to work, we needed a lot of names, for the following reason. Men with the same surname often have the same Y-chromosome signature, precisely because they are related to a common ancestor. It would be no use recruiting lots of men with the same surname just because they all lived in an area we needed to cover. Like as not, most of them would have the same Y-chromosome. To give you an extreme example, we could have got more than enough DNA samples from the Colne Valley in West Yorkshire just by writing to men with the surname Dyson. But 90 per cent of Dysons have the same Y-chromosome, owing to their common ancestry. We would get plenty of one particular Y-chromosome fingerprint and precious little else, and so our impression of Colne Valley genetics would be very misleading. For Plan B to give results for the Colne Valley that did give a representative picture of the whole area, we had to get DNA from all the local surnames. We would need to write to Dysons, Bamforths, Sykeses, Hirsts, Sutcliffes, Hills, Woods, etc., etc.